A Gift from Jesus and John, by Ruthie Nicklaus. Commissioned by St. Paul’s for our use this Advent.
There is another gift waiting for us under the Advent tree.
Maybe you’ve already guessed this, but I love gifts at this time of year. I was the kid up at 4:30am tormenting my drowsy parents about the loot Santa left us down in the living room. And now as an adult and a faith leader, I love exploring the idea of gifts, of giftedness, God giving gifts, God as a gift. Sometimes we roll our eyes about arrogant people and say, “They just think they’re God’s gift.” But that’s actually how I think about you, people of St. Paul’s, except in a kind and good way. I think you really are God’s gift — God’s gift to me, of course, but more vitally — and even urgently — you are God’s gift to this neighborhood, this city, this world. And so I thank God for you.
But enough about you for now! There’s a present to open! Let’s open our next gift under the Advent tree. (And look! We have two Advent trees this week! But alas, only one additional gift.) We’ve already opened two gifts these past two Sundays, as many of you know. The first Christians gave us the gift of community in a world that’s desperate for it. And the ancient Israelites gave us the gift of challenge and confrontation — our faith challenges us, and that is a rough but bracing and invigorating gift.
And now we have a third gift, but unlike the other two, one of which was wrapped beautifully, the other roughly, this gift isn’t wrapped at all. It’s just a plain, dull box. And when we open it, we discover … a clod of earth.
That’s right. Just a lump of soil.
Thanks?
This seems like the kind of present in the “brown socks from Grandma” category. But let’s investigate. I think, when we examine this gift more closely, we will find it to be wondrous, insightful, even inspiring.
The soil in the box comes from the mud floor of John the Baptist’s prison. He is languishing there, all too aware of his approaching doom. (By the way, ancient prisons were even worse than our awful ones: they didn’t feed prisoners or care for them in any way, so when Jesus says “I was in prison and you visited me,” he’s talking about a life-saving act, not just a kind gesture.) So, John has swung pretty low, as low as it gets, wilting in futility, crouched in the corner of an ancient Judean prison cell.
But then, John the Baptist never loomed large on the world stage. He spent his whole life on the edge of the wilderness, shouting at people to repent and confess their sins, announcing someone else’s arrival, someone who always would overshadow him. And now he is reaching his own end, and he humbly wonders: was I right? Is Jesus the One?
But Jesus replies to this question in a curious way. His answer resonates with the songs of the prophets: the blind, the differently abled, the hearing impaired, the poor, the dead — all the people who, for one of these reasons, do not have access to the holy places — they are being raised up. This may stir and inspire us, but note that it is not a mighty political manifesto: the city is still held by a foreign power; the people as a whole are still oppressed; and the Messiah himself is all too aware of his own eventual imprisonment and execution.
And then Jesus says something that comes across (accurately) as defensive. When he says, “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” he is essentially saying, “John will be satisfied if he accepts this answer — for what it is, and for what it is not. He will be happy if he accepts that I’m not all that he hoped I would be.”
This is like the political candidate who disappoints her followers with an unsatisfying answer to an important question, and then says, “if my supporters don’t like that, they should vote for somebody else.” Jesus is in some ways a disappointment — and Jesus himself knows this.
And so we hold in our hands today a clod of earth, given to us by these two strange people, John and Jesus, God’s prophet and God’s Son, the Forerunner and the Messiah, the two who seemed to promise a revolution, and turned out to simply be helping the poor.
Thanks?
But let’s stay with them a bit longer. Let’s sit cross-legged outside John’s cell, in the dirt, and visit with him. And let’s draw alongside the disciples as Jesus delivers his inspiring — yet ultimately disconcerting — answer to the question, “Are you the One?”
Yes, Jesus is the One. But in his divinity, in his procession from the Creator, in his unending life as one among the Three in One, the second Person in the one, holy, and undivided Trinity: in all of this, Jesus is the Humble One.
Today’s gift is the gift of humility.
God is both omnipresent and omnipotent — God contains and soars beyond all times and places, and God commands all of the potency, all of the potential, all of the power, of the created universe — but God comes among us as one who serves. God seeks the lowest place. As the hymn writer Brian Wren sings it, “We strain to glimpse your mercy seat, and find you kneeling at our feet.”
Jesus is the One, but Jesus is the Humble One.
And so God does not descend theatrically from on high and immediately give us happy endings. If God did that, then the universe — us included — would become nothing more than God’s home theater, God’s plaything. And so it is good that God is present and powerful in humility: a full and serendipitous universe flourishes as a result. This is the genius, this is the wonder, of God’s magnificent yet humble omnipresence and omnipotence.
But oh, this is hard news, too. For God does not save children from school shootings; instead, God of the Five Wounds is embodied by those slaughtered children. God does not proceed into this space in blinding splendor; instead, God is found beside the desperate souls who use our Honey Buckets and fret about another approaching night of cold and rain. God did not reverse my mother’s deadly cancer; instead, God gathered around her in and with her husband and her seven children, who watched helplessly as she lay dying, yet held tightly onto her frightened hand.
“The blind receive sight,” Jesus says, perhaps with a double meaning: the literally myopic people can physically see better — Jesus offered free healthcare — but the Messiah opens our eyes of insight, too. God is not likened to a magician who dazzles us with wondrous cures; no, God is closer to a hospice nurse, a skillful healer, a social worker, a case worker, or even just their practical supplies and equipment. God takes the lowest place.
Jesus is the One, but Jesus is the Humble One.
At first glance, I confess this disappoints me. I have big dreams, and profound hopes. I have big dreams for St. Paul’s in particular. Generational-transformation dreams. Congregation-on-a-Mission dreams. This past week I shared one of these dreams with John, our senior warden. My dreams — they sparkle. They shine. And when I hold this gift of humility in my hand, this clod of earth, my dreams seem gauzy, fantastic, maybe impossible.
But then I had a conversation with Prue, one of the nine people who helped with a major cleanup project this week. Thank Prue when you see her today: among countless other things she did, Prue took away a cluster of old paint cans we had been storing, and told me she would examine each can and fill the wet ones with cat litter — forming a clod of earth that protects the environment around the landfill. She also rescued our Mary icon from being mistakenly thrown out with the enormous pile of rubbish that was being taken away, to everyone’s profound relief. Blessed is the one who takes no offense at Prue, who in these acts of service reveals the advent of the Humble One in the here and now, down below this room, where the paint cans had sat for years, where Our Lady’s icon reveals the splendor of God’s incarnation, and where there now is a tidy and useful storage room, with more room to hold supplies for our ministry with our unhoused neighbors.
My dreams for St. Paul’s — our dreams for St. Paul’s — will come to pass, with God’s help. But this is how they come to pass, day by day, paint can by paint can. “Stir up your power!” we cried to God this morning, in the Collect for the Day. “Stir up your power, and with great might come among us!” And so God will; and so God does. But always in humility, in our daily patterns of work and rest, in our willingness to come back each day to make one small part of our dream take shape, in our busy hands and active minds and open hearts, in our weary but beautiful and strong bodies.
God does not loom above us as a doting overlord, and sometimes I wish God would do exactly that, if only to save innocent life. No, God becomes innocent life, and helps us clean out the storage room, while firing our dreams for God’s future, which even now is rising up, right here.
And as for those dreams of ours: well. There is one more gift coming this Advent, next week, and it will be placed under the tree by Joseph, one of the parents of Jesus, a humble tradesman who had startling dreams.
There is more, always more, still yet to come.
***
Preached on the Third Sunday of Advent (Year A), December 11, 2022, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146:4-9
James 5:7-10
Matthew 11:2-11